Gore Vidal, although not a philosopher, springs to mind. — Tom Storm
I wonder what a Foucauldian riposte to this would be. Often felt that the postmodern challenge to rationalism and science and progress and its constant urge for reinvention is like a form of Romanticism, but with cynicism and disenchantment where hope and love used to sit. — Tom Storm
Where do we need a concept of truth in there? The entire concept seems, dare I say, redundant. — Isaac
What is it to assert ? — Pie
What does it mean for something to be? — Pie
A theory is committed to those and only those entities to which the bound variables of the theory must be capable of referring in order that the affirmations made in the theory be true. — Quine, “On What There Is”.
There is no word or construction that cannot be converted to a new use by an ingenious or ignorant speaker...
We should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.
Do you now acknowledge that our statements have truthmakers? — Luke
1. What is a Truth-maker?
1.1 Truth-making as Entailment
1.2 Truth-making as Necessitation
1.3 Truth-making as Projection
1.4 Truth-making in terms of Essentialism
1.5 Axiomatic Truth-making
1.6 Truth-Making as Grounding
...the question of 'what is truth' cannot be answered without a discussion of belief (which I understand you see as almost unrelated?). — Isaac
Surely there are no falsehoods without a conscious entity to make them. I.e. truth is the default state of the universe, those truths might be unrevealed without a conscious entity to discern them but they are still there, simply as properties of the universe. — TheVeryIdea
Talk of mental models and representation in general seems to want to put two things together side by side, but it seems that only the thing on our side is intelligible. How does 'the sky is blue' match anything ? — Pie
The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.
It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.
To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
how a world without observers is different from just an "ineffable clump" — Jerry
Truth isn't what is real, but rather, what observers can construct from what is real. — Jerry
It's correct to say that there are no falsehoods without conscious entities, but that also holds for truths. "Truth", as I argue, is completely observer-dependent. It's incorrect to say "truth is the default state of the universe" because without observers, there is no truth. — Jerry
https://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htmAll at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.... The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface...
It took my breath away. Never, up until these last few days, had I suspected the meaning of "existence." I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, wearing their spring clothes. I said, like them, "The sea is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an "existing seagull"; usually existence conceals itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word "being." Or else I was thinking — how can I put it? I was thinking of properties. I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that green was one of the qualities of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form added to things from the outside, without changing any thing in their nature. And then all at once, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost harmless look of an abstract category: it was the dough out of which things were made, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the patches of grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder — naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness.
...
Absurdity: another word. I struggle against words; beneath me there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity. A movement, an event in the tiny colored world of men is only relatively absurd — in relation to the accompanying circumstances. A madman's ravings, for example, are absurd in relation to the situation in which he is, but not in relation to his own delirium. But a little while ago I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root — there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. How can I pin it down with words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound, secret delirium of nature could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of the segment of a straight line around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, in contrast, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain I repeated, "This is a root" — it didn't take hold any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous; stubborn look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand in general what a root was, but not at all that one there. That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.
...
But at the heart of this ecstasy, something new had just appeared; I understood the nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential point is contingency. I mean that by definition existence is not necessity. To exist is simply ... to be there; existences appear, let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce them. Some people, I think, have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a being that was necessary and self-caused. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, and, therefore, perfectly gratuitous. Everything is gratuitous, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize this, your heart turns over and everything begins to float...
— Sartre
So you want to make the questions unanswerable, to make them no longer questions, and yet to still ask them. — Banno
I gave you reasonable answers, but what you want is unreasonable ones. — Banno
The alien conceptual scheme can only be recognised as a conceptual scheme if there is an interpretation for in in our conceptual scheme. — Banno
If one specifies the conditions under which a sentence is true, one specifies the meaning of that sentence. — Banno
Weren't you at pains recently to explain that neural nets do not have beliefs? I had taken it that we had reached a general agreement that the intentional language of truth, belief and desire was parallel yet independent of the neurological language of empirical priors and suppressing free-energy...? — Banno
If an entire community passionate believes P, then P functions as a truth for them, as an automatically allowed premise, so long as that shared, strong belief persists. — Pie
b) more importantly, still believe that what we discover about the brain constrains our metaphysical notions. If we have a metaphysical idea about belief, it must be of use to us (the real us in the real world of brains and neural nets). — Isaac
1. What does it mean for us to take something to be true? — Isaac
If an entire community passionate believes P, then P functions as a truth for them... — Pie
I don't see a good reason for dropping an analysis of 'truth' founded on a study of the ways it is used. — Isaac
"Take something as" as in decide if it is true or not? That''d be a theory of belief, not truth.
Our deciding if something is true, or not, is irrelevant to it's being true. — Banno
If an entire island decides that the way to survive a famine is to erect giant statues...
...truth doesn't care what they believe. — Banno
Sure, analyse the pragmatics, how the word is used. I encourage an analysis of belief. — Banno
It seems you're answering the question "What is truth?" from a position of already holding that truth is not analysable. That's the third position I laid out above, to answer the question, not with any level of analysis at all, but to say what 'truth' ought to be. "It is useful for us to consider 'true' to be unanalysable." — Isaac
T-sentences do not set out how "truth" ought be used. They set out the way it does functions in logic. SO no, your third position does not apply to T-sentences. — Banno
We all know full well when it's not true — creativesoul
That particular statement is true only if, only when, and only because the cat is on the mat.
Tarski's T sentence illustrates that beautifully. — creativesoul
If I say to you "It's true that my teacup is on my desk", what am I additionally communicating to you that's not covered by "I really strongly believe my tea cup is on my desk", or "I'm behaving as if my teacup is on my desk and it's working", or "anyone looking at the scene would also believe my teacup is on my desk"? — Isaac
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